Agnes Smedley was an American radical journalist and author.
Background
She was probably born in 1894 in rural northern Missouri, perhaps in Osgood, United States, although the facts of her birth and upbringing are obscure. The Smedley genealogy can be traced to pre-Revolutionary Quaker stock in Pennsylvania, but her father was a little-known itinerant laborer and her mother was a washerwoman. She was the second daughter and the second of the five children of Charles H. Smedley and Sarah (Ralls) Smedley.
Smedley grew up in the coal-mining town of Trinidad, Colorado.
Education
Like their parents, none of the Smedley children went to high school, and Agnes did not even finish grade school, struggling to gain an education through irregular attendance at school and reading in her spare time.
She spent a year (1911 - 1912) studying at the Tempe Normal School in Arizona, and some time before 1916 she moved to California, where she attended a summer session at the University of California at Berkeley. She attended evening lectures at New York University.
She took up the study of Indian history, briefly doing graduate study at the University of Berlin.
Career
To supplement the family's meager income, she worked as a hired girl and waitress. After her mother's death, when Agnes was sixteen, she left her family.
For many years her life was a series of disappointments. She became, for a short period, a schoolteacher in a remote county school in New Mexico. Before moving to New York City in 1916 or 1917, she met the anarchist Emma Goldman and participated with her in the free speech movement in San Diego.
On March 18, 1918, she was arrested and charged with violating the Espionage Act by failing to register as an agent for the Indian Nationalist party, which she belatedly learned had accepted German funds. The charges were dismissed, but not until Smedley had spent several weeks in prison and had become thoroughly disenchanted with her native land.
Late in 1919 Smedley left the United States and spent most of the rest of her life abroad. Until 1928 she lived in Berlin with the Indian nationalist leader Virendranath Chattopadhyaya. The complexities of their life led her to a nervous breakdown and an attempted suicide. After her recovery she began teaching English to university students. She continued her political efforts in behalf of Indian nationalism. Daughter of Earth (1929) was Smedley's first book.
When she arrived in China in 1928 as special correspondent for the liberal Frankfurter Zeitung, Smedley immediately identified herself with the Chinese Communists, who were in rebellion against the government of Chiang Kai-shek. As correspondent for the Zeitung and, after about 1930, for the Manchester Guardian, she began a career as a journalist and freelance writer and reported about the Chinese Communist movement. In Shanghai she made the acquaintance of leading antigovernment intellectuals and established contacts with members of the outlawed Chinese Communist party (CCP).
Although Smedley did not enter Communist-controlled areas of China until 1937 or view the Chinese Communist movement at firsthand, she was covertly supplied with exclusive information by CCP agents in Shanghai, a fact that between 1928 and 1936 gave her writings a notoriety that surpassed their intrinsic merits.
Her books Chinese Destinies: Sketches of Present-Day China (1933) and China's Red Army Marches (1934) are based on her clandestine encounters with Chinese Communists. Attacked by the Chinese press and placed under police surveillance, Smedley went to a rest sanatorium in the Soviet Union in 1933 and in 1934 returned for a short visit to the United States.
By late 1935, however, she was back in China, serving the cause that gave her life purpose and meaning. In July 1936 Edgar Snow made a major journalistic coup by slipping through the KMT military blockade of Mao Tse-tung's stronghold in Shensi, thereby providing Westerners with their first authoritative view of the Chinese Communist movement. Infuriated that Snow and not she herself had been the first to gain access, Smedley immediately set out for north China. Fortuitously, she happened to be in Sian in December 1936 when Chiang Kai-shek was kidnapped and briefly held captive by rebellious Manchurian troops of the Tungpei Army.
Probably the only Western journalist in Sian at the time of Chiang's abduction, she conducted English-language radio broadcasts for the Tungpei Army until January 1937, when she journeyed to Mao's headquarters at Yenan. The years from 1937 to 1940 were the happiest of Smedley's life. While in Yenan she energetically promoted visits to the Communist areas by such journalistic colleagues as Victor Keen of the New York Herald Tribune and even directed a rat-extermination campaign.
When the Sino-Japanese War erupted in July 1937, she devoted herself to the war effort. From October 1937 to January 1938, she traveled with the roving headquarters of the Eighth Route Army in Shansi.
China Fights Back: An American Woman with the Eighth Route Army (1938) is the diary of her experiences with the Red Army in Shansi. In January 1938 Smedley went to Hankow, where she organized a committee to collect money and supplies for the Eighth Route Army; joined the Chinese Red Cross Medical Corps; and also served as an intermediary between such CCP officials as Chou En-lai and the foreign diplomatic and news communities.
When Hankow fell to the advancing Japanese in October 1938, she made her way south to the areas in the lower Yangtze region controlled by the recently formed Communist New Fourth Army. From late 1938 to mid-1940, she roamed through central China with units of the New Fourth Army, distributing Red Cross supplies, establishing medical stations, and periodically filing reports with the Manchester Guardian.
Smedley returned to the United States in the summer of 1941. After more than twenty years, America seemed "entirely foreign" to her. From 1941 to 1949, when she left the United States for the last time, she made radio appearances, lectured, and continued to write. Battle Hymn of China, an account of her experiences from 1938 to 1941, was published in 1943.
Smedley's last years were tragic. She was identified with a secret agent for the Soviet Union. Finding it increasingly difficult to obtain speaking engagements, to sell articles, or even to rent a place in which to live, avoided by some friends and fearful that others would be deemed guilty by association with her, in November 1949 she sought refuge in England, hoping to complete a biography of Gen. Chu Teh, commander-in-chief of the Communist military forces, The Great Road: The Life and Times of Chu Teh, published posthumously.
In May 1950, after several unsuccessful attempts to return to her beloved China, Smedley died in an Oxford nursing home of bronchopneumonia, following surgery for stomach ulcers.
Increasingly active in political affairs, she opposed American entry into World War I. Her unflagging support of the CCP and criticism of the KMT was not well received in a postwar America that was hardening into a rigid antiCommunist mold. In February 1949 she was identified as a secret agent for the Soviet Union. When she denounced the accusation as a "despicable lie" and threatened to institute legal proceedings, the secretary of the army publicly admitted that there was no evidence against her and withdrew the charge.
She was more radical than most Chinese Communists, a fact which even they recognized.
Views
Besides rejecting capitalism, she opposed marriage, the family, and all constituted authority.
Quotations:
"We belonged to the class, " Smedley wrote, "who have nothing and from whom everything is always taken away".
Personality
Her family background and brutalized personal life instilled in her a spirit of defiance against all constituted authority and a sympathy for the poor. She was an irreverent woman, blunt in her appraisals.
Quotes from others about the person
As Upton Sinclair wrote, "Nobody could ever persuade her that there was either freedom or justice in her country" (Sinclair, "The Red Dragon").
According to Battle Hymn, she disliked the "intellectual arrogance of certain Chinese Communists", and refused in her own words to become "a mere instrument in the hands of men who believed that they held the one and only key to truth".
Connections
Her brief early marriage to an undergraduate at the University of California, Ernest Walfred Brundin, ended in divorce.